If I had a photo of me and Danielle Corsetto, of course I’d have run it here in honor of hordes of her readers coming to visit. This is the best I have as an alternate offering. I leapt into a photo of Dave ‘Sheldon’ Kellett and Scott ‘PvP’ Kurtz. If you read comics on the web, you already read theirs, I know.
Like a lot of cities you hear about, mine has bought up a whole bunch of ex-train land and turned it into a nice greenway. I’ve ridden bicycles on it and longboards on it. It’s nice. It’s not as long as Boston’s, which my wife and I got to ride around on a few weeks ago, but it’s cool! Here’s an illustration I did for The Memphis Flyer for a related article. I thought I was cramming different users in the image to make the point of what the line was good for. Turns out it really is crowded on nice days.
I made a few more abortive attempts to get past the boulder and its attendant thorn bush. No go. So I started working my way up the Right Hand Wall again. I was kissing this stupid wall enough to think we’d have to marry. My skills were not up to getting up this thing, so I eventually found myself standing next to one of the pylons that supported the I-beams that supported the tracks. There was a little shade, and a little place to stand and time to reflect on what it would take to get onto the tracks from here.
The tracks, you remember, are easily got onto down at the train station. They touch the ground, there.
They don’t touch the ground here, they’re suspended well over the ground. Heck, I’m way up on this stupid rock wall and they’re still above my head. So, from the look of things, if I decided to take my last option and climb the ladder bolted up under the incline train tracks, here’s what I’d have to do: Belly up onto the top of this pylon I’m in the shadow of now. Get my balance. Walk, run, crawl or scoot out along an I-beam. Work my way over the tracks. Get onto the ladder, avoiding the big greasy cables that run along with it. Climb all the way to the top of the gorge.
Both simple and complex. The simple part is climbing a ladder. We’ve all climbed a ladder. It’s easy! Why wouldn’t I climb a ladder? Well, this one’s at a hard angle. I’d have to support my weight on my arms and my legs. Still, I could stop and rest along the way. But I’d have to GET there, and that involves scootching out along an I-beam that’s well off the rocky, thorny, rotten, stupid, WHERE THE HELL IS MY BOAT, MY PADDLE AND MY FRIENDS? DAMMIT, THIS IS NOT FUNNY!
After calming down, I more calmly and carefully explained to God (The great cartoonist in the sky) that THIS isn’t funny. Badly written. I said all this out loud to Him, and why not? I said all this very calmly and carefully because you don’t want to upset Him, not here and not now. So. Having said my say, I did what most people in a hard spot do. I climbed up onto a pylon to get a better look at what kind of gag he’d written me into. Okay, not what most people do in a hard spot. I’m just pointing out how hard a spot this is.
From the top of the pylon, the fall off the I-beam was looking pretty inevitable. Plus, my luck wasn’t going so well. Plus, there was a hell of a lot of track to crab-walk up even if I scootched out to the ladder, which looked farther away than ever, anyhow.
On the other hand, I thought, I can see up along the crack a lot better up here, let’s pick a route and see… Ahhh, nuts. The climb up this crack on terra firma (terra sonofabitcha) looks bad. Really, really bad.
So. Vertigo and head injury, or twisted ankles and broken limbs?
I had nearly decided to take the slow, painful death by rock wall, when the unthinkable happened.
The train started to ascend the track.
Okay. Train is moving. If I quit pissing and moaning, crawl out onto this I-beam as fast as I can, I can meet the train going up, grab on, swing myself onto it, and ride in comfort all the way to the top. Heck, this may even be that someone at the top has seen me and they’re rescuing me! This is GREAT!
Does this sound too good to be true to you?
Yeah, we’ll discuss that in part 7.
Welcome to all of Danielle Corsetto’s devoted GWS fans. You guys have crashed the servers of TWO hosts today, and I still managed to get more views today than I usually get in two weeks. I’m awed and grateful. I hope you’ll continue to check out Hubris and Dr. Biner with us. You ROCK!
This is the March 1999 cartoon I did for The Bench Jeweler, a trade newspaper published by a large jewelry wholesaler (Fargotstein’s & Sons- Great people). I don’t remember how often I did these cartoons. It may have been monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly or even all three, depending on the year. but I started doing them before I had a computer in the studio and they ended in, I think, 2000. I still very occasionally have someone track me down to ask if there was ever a book or anything. I doubt there were ever enough cartoons to do a whole book- maybe fifty exist. Because they were done so infrequently and over such a long period and drawn at different sizes, the art style changes a bit. I may try to dig up one of the earlier originals (they were done on 22 inch bristol paper) and scan one in to color and include here one day. That’d be cool. This one was drawn, scanned, and turned into vector art for coloring:
Billy’s back. Billy is in the first cartoon on this site- you have to click the words below the cartoon that say “The Beginning” and you go straight there. In no time, Billy will buy a car, and that’ll make catching his morning paper even more difficult for Hubris. Then, Billy will no doubt be going off to college, him being the industrious early riser he apparently is. Then we get to see how timely and accurate the new paper-delivery-person is. Newscarrier. Subscription Logistics Engineer. Home Media Conduit. D’you ever miss the words ‘Paperboy’ ‘Fireman’ and ‘Mailman’? I know they’re wrongly gender-specific, but damn, they were easier on the memory, the tongue, and the ear.
When I first started paddling, I was told that if your gear all matched, you looked as if you bought it all at the same time, and were therefore a noob and a poser. My paddling skills have always made me look like a noob and a poser, but my gear has almost always been mismatched. Except for this one time when my boat and most of my gear had some kind of purple on it. Savage Fury boat, Lotus pfd, I forget the helmet company and watershoe brand… but I once wore and paddled in a color-coordinated fashion. It had to end. Nothing to do but buy new gear and trade the boat. And thus I got a black and aqua RPM, a red pfd, dug a non-purple helmet out of the closet (always a good idea), kept my greenish paddle with the red duct tape on it, and found a blue rashguard shirt that was very cheap.
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